January 4, 2025 — The ongoing debate about the clinical definition of obesity is soon to get more intense. But already, it tells us pretty clearly that obesity is defined by more than excess weight. New research in Nature Medicine comes at this subject from an entirely different direction. Using proteomics, Lasse Maretty and colleagues find that the effects […]
December 26, 2024 — This has been quite a year. We’ve seen endless death and destruction in Ukraine and the Middle East. People expressed discontent with the status quo in elections all over the world. But most notably for our readers – more than 100,000 of you this year – the progress on obesity and health has been nothing […]
December 21, 2024 — For patients with obesity and sleep apnea, FDA approved a first yesterday. Tirzepatide became the first ever drug with an FDA-approved indication for treating sleep apnea in persons with obesity. The data for this data appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this year. Atul Malhotra and colleagues found: “In two trials, the […]
December 17, 2024 — One of the harms that weight stigma causes is the avoidance of medical care. But an unexpected side effect of GLP-1 therapy in persons with overweight or obesity may be increased engagement with healthcare. This insight comes from a new analysis of electronic health records for 711,783 persons. As the use of these medicines for […]
November 26, 2024 — For the second time this year, we have a meta-analysis of RCTs with GLP-1 medicines that affirms cardiorenal benefits in outcome studies. This latest study appears in Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology. Lead author Sunil Badve described the importance of his analysis: “This is the first study to show a clear benefit of GLP-1 receptor agonists […]
November 25, 2024 — A new study presented at the Annual Scientific Sessions of the American College of Gastroenterology tells us receiving a GLP-1 for diabetes with or without obesity is associated with a halving of pancreatic cancer risk. Is this too good to be true? Observational, of Course The first thing to note is that the finding comes […]
November 12, 2024 — For several years now it has been apparent that success in reducing deaths due to cardiovascular disease has slowed or stopped. This is part of the story of declining U.S. life expectancy that headlines often overlook. New research at the upcoming AHA Scientific Sessions tells us rising obesity might explain much of this trend. In […]
September 18, 2024 — People who think of obesity simply as a disease of fatness are walking around with a profound misunderstanding of this disease – it is very much a disease of inflammation. This thread of inflammation ties obesity to diabetes and ties both of those diseases to the complications of COVID. New research on COVID and diabetes […]
August 31, 2024 — This is a truly remarkable finding. In the middle of the SELECT study of semaglutide for preventing deaths in people with obesity and heart disease, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. So researchers nimbly adapted and began collecting data on COVID outcomes. They found a big surprise. People who got COVID-19 and were treated with semaglutide had […]
August 13, 2024 — For the second time in the past few months, a signal from the surveillance of GLP-1 agonists is surfacing to suggest that these drugs may offer a risk reduction strategy for cancer. Earlier, the signal came from a study of persons receiving treatment for diabetes. The present study, presented at the recent annual meeting for […]
